Why environmental management modules will become integral to ERP

And so it begins. Oracle revealed this week that one of its business partners, developer Ndevr, has created a greenhouse gas management and reporting module that fits in with its core Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne financials applications. Actually, it doesn't just fit, it is pre-integrated.

To me, this development is significant because it integrates environmental compliance concerns with other other core business functions. In other words, it flies against the notion that you need separate software applications for handling greenhouse gas emissions collection, and other environmental reporting functions. Aside from greenhouse gas metrics and data, the new modules handle waste and water consumption tracking, and other metrics that are core part of sustainability reporting standards published by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

There's one very big reason why integration of environmental management software and ERP tools will be really important: It makes collecting and analyzing enviro information easier. Consider this comment from one the executive general managers of Australian mining company, Thiess, which is already using the solution.

"With energy-intensive operations across the mining, construction and engineering industries, we have always carefully managed our greenhouse gas and energy consumption figures. Before we had the Oracle and Ndevr solution in place, this was a very time-consuming and costly process that required us to download data from our JD Edwards system and manipulate it in Excel. That process would take months, but with the integration, we can now view and use greenhouse gas and energy figures for each of our facilities on a daily basis."

So, how about it?

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